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We live overseas and move every couple of years. My daughters get to experience so many cool things, but I always wonder at what cost. I read a study saying that frequent moves put kids at risk for mental health problems — is that true?
––A worried expat mom
The study you’re talking about is here — and you’re not alone in being worried about it. I got a lot of similar messages when it was covered widely in the media.
This paper is a good example of what is possible to do with very large-scale data from Europe. The authors use data on over a million people in Denmark, and they are able to follow their moves during childhood and link that to depression diagnoses later in life. That would be impossible with data from the U.S., but since these European countries have national health systems, the data is more readily accessible and it’s more often possible to link medical conditions to other facts about people.
With such a large dataset, the authors are able to precisely estimate correlations between moving in childhood and depression. However, even a very large and rich dataset cannot directly deliver a causal estimate. Put simply: moving is not random, because there are myriad reasons why someone might move. That doesn’t make a good study.
The basic results in the paper show that moving during childhood increases the risk of depression in adulthood; the increase is large, about a 60% increase for people who moved twice as children and a 40% increase for those who moved once. What the authors cannot see is why the children move, and there are some obvious reasons to think the results might not be because of the move itself.
Notably, a very common reason for moving is parental divorce. We know that parental divorce is associated with later mental health outcomes, and this confound alone could well be driving the results. (This isn’t to be alarmist about divorce; with that, it matters a lot how you handle it). Bottom line: There is a lot of data here, but we’d actually need even more comprehensive data to really know whether the results are meaningful. And there are many reasons to think that why you move matters quite a bit.
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There’s a flip side related to the reason behind the moves. As a fellow expat family that moves every 2-3 years, we think this lifestyle is better for our kids, given our family values. Overseas, our kids attend schools with smaller class sizes and better resources. They make friends with very diverse classmates. Language and cultural exposure is built in. We choose countries (within the opportunities available job-wise) with low costs of living, allowing us to afford help so we can be more present, calmer parents, (for example, we have a beloved housekeeper in our current country, who we pay outrageously above the standard, including retirement and health benefits, and pay to send all five of her children to school through university, and it costs us about $350 a month). As a result of the 40 hours a week she works for us, I can spend more of our weekends and evenings after work playing with my kids and doing art projects with them, which I couldn’t do while living in America. For our family, the risk of gun violence — even just the culture of gun violence, with lockdown drills and media attention — is a nonstarter. Sure, the moves are hard. But we’re removing certain downsides of American living that we hope make up for it. And we have built in consistent routines within the moves, i.e., we visit Grandma and Grandpa for a month every summer, we go to the same summer camp with the same kids every summer, we have Friday night movie nights no matter where we live, etc. So yes, moving is disruptive. But for our family, moving is also…routine? It’s part of our family culture. It also helps that in our community, all the other kids are moving every 2-3 years as well, so the kids have zero shyness or difficulty around starting new schools or making new friends. The current Administration’s slashing of USAID/State Department notwithstanding, we will keep doing this as long as we are able, even though we could make more money in the private sector. We’ll never get rich in this lifestyle (moving is expensive, even when partially subsidized by our employers), but the lifestyle benefits are extremely valuable.
I would like to see a study on military kids and how the regular uprooting impacts them. I have no childhood or high school friends due to moving every 3-4 years (and went to 3 high schools) which has had long term negative impacts for me.
I would say from my own experience alone, the ages you move at and then the frequency of those moves is going to make a big difference. My guess is moving at younger ages and only one or twice would have minimal impact (assuming the family is in tact).